Can anyone lead me to a web site where the downward price trend is carefully described and plotted? I'd like to get a solid sense of when, for example, I will be able to purchase a 42" LCD unit (non-DLP, non-projection) for $900 retail or thereabouts. It appears that manufacturers are well on their way to perfecting the process of the main component - the LCD glass - and the rest of the unit should be more or less commodity parts.
In my opinion, if prices don't cut in half by this time next year, it can only be the result of collusion. Am I wrong?
Yes, your wrong. But it has nothing to do with collusion. Prices are coming down. They came down some this year because of a demand let up this fall. The Korean (and others) manufactures are scaling up to use larger wafers of glass in there production process. There are always some panels that have to get scrapped because of process errors. But a glass substrate that will make 2 to 4 big panels can make a boat load of the smaller panels. So its a supply/demand vs yield issue. Eventually, prices will reach a equilibrium when more manufacturers are building the large substrates and the CRT is regulated to only small specialty applications.
The dirty little secret about these panels is how long the back lights will last and how replaceable they are. People are working on LED type back lights now (with a few interesting twists), and this should help that issue. Time will tell.
Bob
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The price is set by the market and the profit margin of the product.
The manufactures are not going to lower the price if every unit they produce at the current price sells soon after it hits the stores. Competition and manufacturing cost cutting will allow for prices to come down and more units will be sold. The price is already at a point where large numbers of consumers are already replacing current tube based tv sets with lcd or plasma units.
The manufacturing technology is already at the best level it will be for some time with only minor improvements possible in the near future. Until demand starts to fall off, there is no incentive to lower price to spur greater demand.
No. The cost of making an LCD is limited by many factors. The real problem is that the size of an LCD makes a big difference in the reject rate. The bigger an LCD is, the harder it is to make perfect.
The real cost cut will come with Organic LED (OLED) technology. An
800x600 3.5 inch screen will cost wholesale about $5. Currently a
320x240 3.5 inch screen is about $40 in large quantities. This will cut the cost of a handheld device almost in half. They are simple to manufacture, the process is similar to printing with an ink jet printer.
OLEDs are "active" devices. they need no backlighting and they are unafected by temperature. They are inherently high contrast.
The downside is that in 3,000 hours of use the blue LEDs will be half the brightness of when it was new. Obviously when new, the price will be high, but in two or three years, the screen for your 42 inch TV will cost $100. Either it will be user replaceable, or it will just be a screen with a seperate tuner.
Eventually it will reach movie theaters who will use an OLED screen instead of a projector and passive screen. Once a year the theater will close and a new screen, delivered in a roll like a rug will be rolled out to replace the old one.
Since the material is plastic, a conductive coating and bio-degradeable active elements, the old screen can be safely rolled up and put out in the trash.
Geoff.
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Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm@mendelson.com N3OWJ/4X1GM
IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 IL Fax: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838
The trouble with being a futurist is that when people get around to believing
you, it's too late. We lost. Google 2,000,000:Hams 0.
Cheap OLED TVs have been a year or two away for as long as I can remember. I'll believe it when I see it. I have not seen anything beyond the tiny displays on the outside of cell phones.
Until recently, engineers have had considerable difficulty in creating large OLED displays. They've apparently succeeded. I haven't seen it in person, but Samsung has produced a 40-inch OLED TV:
No you're not. The manufacturers and all involved in the chain down to your local retail store are and always have been greedy bastards. They are simply NOT going to reduce the price on anything they produce and market until the consumers exert enough pressure by simply choosing not to buy at grossly marked up prices.(Or would you believe all these nay-sayers when the history of retail pricing says different? Or have you forgotten how they gouged us on early vcrs not to mention the scandalous prices they charged us for the tapes that went in these machines?)
Everything I've read suggests that profit margins are very slim on LCD TVs. Large LCD panels are very expensive to make. There are only a hand full of multi-billion $ factories in the world that can make them. Remember how long it took for LCDs in laptops to become large and affordable? If they could sell a large LCD TV for $300 someone would already be doing it.
What makes you think early VCRs were over priced? The technology was a lot more expensive back then. Compare an early VCR to a modern VCR. The modern one has a fraction of the complexity and materials. Andy Cuffe
And do you have any idea how little it actually costs to produce the product? Pennies on the dollar.
Most of the technology for LCD and flat screen imaging has been around for donkey years, so it didn't cost that much to develop what's on the market today. Really just refinements along the way.
Besides if even 10 cent of every retail dollar actually went towards paying the worker a fair wage I'd be the last to complain.
Believe everything you read, do you? As for the technology being so rare and so expensive. How is it then that Sharp has been producing 6ft flat screens televisions for the past 15 or so years. Like I said flat screen technology has been around donkey years. The ONLY reason it's become so prevalent in the general consumer market is because they have found an inexpensive means of mass producing them. I can remember lcd's being used in military applications back in the early 80's
I don't think, I know. don't be so quick to buy into the concept of "expensive" technology. No one research lab has the corner market on the latest technological breakthrough. There are dozens if not hundreds of research concerns all working along parallel lines and for the most part at the same level. Just as there are many different solutions to any technological need so are there R&D firms who'll sell your manufacturing business a less expensive method for producing the end product. Prices are only high because of the marketing strategy/tactics of the name brand companies ( Sony, Panasonic, JVC etc...) and their attempts to throttle out any competition from the less established companies. Besides the real point is the gross disparity between the cost of producing the goods and what they charge for it. Or do you think it's a good thing to pay 10 fold or higher over the actually cost of the end product?
So since you have it all figured out, why aren't you investing in these companies making so much money, or building the products yourself and doning business in the way that you think is fair? The big bad corporate world won't let you in, right?
The electronics business is like every other business. There are winners, losers, and everything in between, at every level from the miner to the consumer. You could say the same stuff about the auto industry or the hamburger business. Obviously, you identify better with the losers.
The Eagles said it best..."I'd like to find your inner child and kick its little ass, get over it, get over it."
He probably never looked *inside* one of those original VCR's.
They were a marvel of discrete electronics and precision-machined mechanical parts. VCR's only started to get really 'cheap' when the technology developed to the point where IC's replaced most of those components...and the IC's had enough error correction to compensate for 'less than precise' transports; AND the original R&D bucks had been paid back.
Beta didn't really survive that far. They were never actually 'cheap', although the development of the technology--both before and after the introduction of consumer machines--allowed somewhat cheaper solutions for the professional uses that the Beta recording format was subsequently employed.
Having been involved for a while in the production of consumer electronics hardware, yes I do have a pretty good idea. The actual cost of materials is not always terribly high but from keeping the lights on in the factory to packaging materials to paying for shipping, and all the other things that take a cut the profit margins are razor thin. Nobody is getting rich making this stuff, it's hard to even make a decent living while competing against underpaid workers in 3rd world nations.
If it were possible to make a load of money undercutting everyone selling HDTV sets I'd be doing it myself. Why don't you give it a shot?
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